By ANDREW CRUM, Staff Writer
After helping lead Pace to a postseason berth, Ashley Galvan will continue her soccer career next year in college.
She will attend Mount Marty College, a small, private Catholic school in Yankton, S.D. Galvan made her decision official during a signing ceremony Wednesday at Pace.
Galvan, a three-year starter and a co-captain for the past two seasons at Pace, was chosen as an all-district first-team defender for District 32-5A and was on the All-Metro second team. She will get a scholarship that is half academic and half athletic to attend the four-year liberal arts college.
She began gaining interest from coaches at the beginning of the school year. In August, she received an invitation to visit The Kings College in New York City.
“That’s when I actually started to think that I could play in college,” she said. “Mount Marty came along about halfway through the season.
“I’ve always really wanted to play (soccer in college), I just didn’t think I was good enough.”
The Lancers’ coach, Peter Shepherd, saw Galvan on some of her Hudl highlight videos and was interested in the Pace defender.
“She’s a natural defender,” Pace coach Jesus O. Villarreal said. “She started out as a goalie but moved to defender due to an injury, and she was first-team in district the last two years. To my knowledge, we had no goals scored on us from the middle because of Ashley. She’s a stopper.”
Galvan plans on studying criminal justice and hopes to pursue a career on a SWAT team, for which the college has a program. While she had other offers, including some from schools in Texas, Galvan said she found the right place.
“Everything just fit in perfect,” she said about the college that had everything she wanted. “It was just something about it, it just felt right.”
For Villarreal, that is one of his objectives as a coach, to get his players to college.
“I try to educate them to not only play for the high school, but to pursue playing at the next level,” he said. “The way I train them is a transitional level. Varsity players train to play to become transitional players, and the JV players are training to be varsity players.
“As long as I’m here, I’m going to educate them on and off the field.”
Andrew Crum covers sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6629 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter he’s @andrewmcrum.